ADS Business Conditions Index
The Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti (ADS) Business Conditions Index tracks real U.S. economic conditions at daily frequency by blending six economic indicators: weekly initial jobless claims, monthly payroll employment, industrial production, real personal income less transfers, real manufacturing and trade sales, and quarterly GDP. The index is produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
The ADS index is designed to track real business conditions at high observation frequency. Its underlying (seasonally adjusted) economic indicators blend high-frequency and low-frequency data. The ADS index on this web page is updated in real time as new or revised data on the index's underlying components are released.
The average value of the ADS index is zero. Progressively bigger positive values indicate progressively better-than-average conditions, whereas progressively more negative values indicate progressively worse-than-average conditions. A value of -3.0, for example, would indicate business conditions noticeably worse than at any time in either the 1990-91 or the 2001 recession, during which the ADS index never dropped below -2.0.